Interview With Professor Ramez Maluf, Lebanese American University

Ramez Maluf is director of the Beirut Institute for Media Arts at the Lebanese American University and editor in chief of the Middle Eastern Broadcasters' Journal. Maluf spoke with Keith Porter and Kristin McHugh at a Stanley Foundation conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in December 2005 for the public radio documentary "24/7: The Rise and Influence of Arab Media." Professor Maluf notes that while not all mass society movements are intertwined with the mass media, some clearly are. He begins with an example of Lebanon after the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005.

Ramez Maluf: The crowds were playing up to television. They wanted to send a message out. They knew the cameras would be there. They wanted to express there anger at the killing, their desire for the Syrians to leave Lebanon, and so they held demonstrations asking for the withdrawal of Syrian forces, condemning the killing. The following day the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, made a comment to the effect, "Well, these demonstrations were not as large as people said they were because the cameras were actually zooming in and making a big deal of a few people." And so the same crowds held another demonstration, and it was a much bigger one as well, although the first one was substantial, and they held large signs asking the cameras to "Zoom Out." So the signs said, "Zoom Out" and "Zoom In," sending a message to Bashar al-Assad that these were really huge demonstrations. And, of course, they were.

Q: I like the interplay there that shows a level of sophistication on the part of the protestors. They sort of understood the role of the media perhaps better than President Assad did.

Maluf: Yeah. Well, I mean he's becoming pretty savvy about that. I mean he's revamped his Syrian TV in the last couple of months—introduced a whole bunch of new factors into the television station, changed the sets, retrained his staff or the Syrian TV staff, and is trying to make it more credible by even allowing opposition figures, mild opposition, obedient opposition figures to show up on the screen. But obviously I think that media, in this case, in Beirut can be cited as having played a very significant role in the way developments played out in the weeks after the assassination of Prime Minister Hariri.

Q: One of the things in our documentary that we're trying to communicate to people is the scope of this rise of open media in the Arab world because Americans have heard of Al Jazeera maybe, but that's about it. They don't have any feel for how big this really is. Can you give us some understanding of how big of a phenomenon this is?

Maluf: It's a significant phenomenon that I think we're all trying to come to grips with and understand. But if I may sort of narrow the issue and make one point, it's that 15 years ago all Arabs saw state-run television which were both obedient and syncophatic, but also uninteresting, because they were not market led. They just had to please the Ministry of Information. Today they see 200, 250 stations, many more channels, of course, because of the digital television and they are bombarded with all kinds of things: the news, information, entertainment. And this has created a whole new perspective on what the media is in the Arab world. And I think it's quite challenging and difficult to understand and certainly difficult to understand its implications in the short run.

Q: Then let's talk a little about the impact of that. I mean you have all these stations. People have access to all this. They used to have access only to state-run television. What's been the impact on the average viewer in the Arab world?

Maluf: I think the best way out of it for me not to have to answer it is to say that you really must be able to look at local areas and see what the local impact was in specific countries, maybe even in specific towns or cities and see what these stations actually did locally. Now on a Pan-Arab level and a global level, it has had a list of consequences that are easily articulated but maybe the implications are not clear. For example, it has helped unify standard Arabic as a language of communication which wasn't the case before. It has created even a common game show culture or a common music culture. It has allowed Arabs to be informed about issues in other Arab countries in a manner that they were not before. It has allowed them also to look at these issues from a Pan-Arab—a strong Pan-Arab—perspective. And I think that this is a point that maybe needs to be looked at more carefully because these Pan-Arab issues—almost all of them—are in juxtaposition to Western issues. These are the big issues which Arabs are concerned with: Pan-Arabism, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Islam versus Christianity, and so forth. And I think significantly Pan-Arab television has brought these confrontational issues to a peak.

Q: What could you tell us about the business side of this? There are a few stations we know that people tend to watch a lot. Are any of them making money and, if not, how do they survive?

Maluf: Some of them claim to be making money, among them Future Television and LBC, both of them Lebanese stations. The vast majority of them do not make money. Some would say none of them make money. However, they are commercial stations, market driven. Particularly the entertainment stations are very interested in making money. They want to make a profit. They recognize that this might be something that's going to take a few years, and that's not unusual for different media. Media traditionally, in all parts of the world including the more developed economies, takes a long time to make money. It's said that the Washington Post took 18 years to break even. So this is not unusual. Some of them, however, suffer from what people know as the "deep pocket syndrome." In other words, people who own them don't really care whether they make money as long as they can get their message out. However all of them, even those who are willing to lose money, want the stations to have large audiences, which is very different from what happened with state television where state television thought people had no choice.

Q: Is there a trickle-down effect here on other media? State-run television, newspapers, radio stations—how have they changed in response to the rise of the Pan-Arab satellite channels?

Maluf: There are a lot of lessons from the rise of television in the West and the way print tried to deal with it back in the beginning in the '50s, '60s, '70s, and so forth. Some of these lessons have been adapted here by having newspapers becoming more investigative, by being in some cases more local, addressing issues that Pan-Arab television would not be interested in. However, this is a very serious issue to which there are no clear answers. As you may know, even in the United States now, there's a readaptation of the print medium, because of not just television but also the Internet. What people talk a lot about these days in the Arab world is convergence. This issue of adaptation hasn't been settled yet, and I think it's an ongoing problem and different parts of country of the Arab world are dealing with it differently. But leadership has diminished in most areas because of television.

Q: Part of what we've heard is that the reason television has gained so much prominence in the Arab region is because of the overall education level. People can better understand television versus the Internet or newspapers. Is that true?

Maluf: I think this is very, very true. And I've read a study that says, for example in North Africa, where the illiteracy rate is very high, satellite television offered the population at-large their first introduction to classical standard Arabic ever except for mosque recitals of the Koran. And that this was their baptism by fire, if you will, into classical Arabic, and they had a hard time even understanding it. But people have cited that as one of the beneficial examples of these dubbed Mexican tele-novellas—that they actually introduce classical Arabic to largely illiterate populations.

Q: What's the future of Arab media?

Maluf: It's always too early to predict the future, right? So I think that we're going to see consolidation, maybe. We're going to see more niche stations. We're going to see more concern with local issues and local matters. I think on a Pan-Arab scale there are only so many stations that will be able to compete. And that will come to a decision very soon. It's not unusual when you have a new industry developing that you have a lot of players that come in and try to stake a claim to it. But if normal business practices prevail then you're going to have some form of consolidation. It's hard to tell because we're not really in a rational market here. Some people might decide to keep the stations up regardless. But I would suggest consolidation.

Q: You think that it may take the same form that American media has taken in the last 10 to 15 years in terms of consolidation of radio markets, television networks, newspapers, coming under single ownership all over the country? At some point that may happen here too?

Maluf: I'm very worried about predicting the future simply because technology seems to make possibilities that we would not have thought of 10, 15 years ago. I mean I'm sure you would like to hear a prediction, but I'll have to pass. Let me give you an example: today in Palestine, in occupied territories, there's 60 television stations just there and some of them tend only to the town. Why? Because the technology makes it possible. And so is this going to happen more and more? Am I, sitting in my office in Beirut, going to be able to look at the TV station that caters to university professors interested in media, and we're going to have debate and video conferencing on this? Will somebody who is interested in sailing have a sailing station because it's become that cheap? Of course I'm minimizing, and wrongly so, the cost of production. I mean, the technology makes it, but of course you'll still have to produce. But I think the big networks will have to consolidate. Will there [also] be a lot of independent TV stations and media outlets that will give you diversity? I think so.

"24/7: The Rise and Influence of Arab Media" is a Stanley Foundation production in association with KQED Public Radio. The documentary is produced by Simon Marks, Keith Porter, and Kristin McHugh. The full program includes segments on Arab broadcast media, the regional perspectives on the rise of Arab media, Washington perspectives on the shifting Arab media landscape, and an essay by David Brancaccio on the influence of satellite television on Arab society. Exclusive interviews with Al Jazeera senior anchor Jamil Azar, US Central Command's Media Engagement Team, senior CNN correspondent Jane Arraf, and Professor Ramez Maluf of the Lebanese American University are also available.